What are you playing?

[Phasmatis]

I don't really see how you can make an MMO from Deus Ex. If you're an augmented civilian perhaps, but what would you do as a civilian in the Deus Ex world? Wait for an augmented agent to uncover the secret plot to control the population and then sit back knowing you did nothing or will you be one of the thousands of agents who works for UNATCO finding out your bosses are evil guys all along. I do like to idea of having to kill a load of bums to get enough XP to buy your first aug though.

[gamer0004]

Something like Secret World, I suppose. You could be like an MJ12 trooper, taking over facilities, or a UNATCO trooper, or NSF, or whatever. All these organisations would of course be trying to capture each other's intel, vaccine, guns &c.

Of course, most people shouldn't be augmented, but this being Square Enix, that would probably be the case because awesome.

[Jonas]

Well if they set it during the DXHR period before nanoaugmentations, it would be completely justified to have a load of mech augs running around, assuming they have reason to submit to heavy augmentation (so anybody who's in the military or private security would work).

I still don't fancy the prospects of DX as an MMO. Most of what makes MMOs work (or not) doesn't fit into the DX formula at all, and most of what makes Deus Ex amazing wouldn't work in anything approaching a traditional MMO.

[shadowblade34]

Completed Splinter Cell Blacklist yesterday. It was pretty terrible, and go even more so by the end.

Other than that, however, I managed to get Fallout New Vegas working for the first time in 2-3 years without crashing that much, and completed the main story before I started school, that was a couple of months ago. As for now, I'm still playing Crusader Kings 2. I fabricated a claim on a region in France, allowing me to invade it, which then resulted in me being able to invade the rest of Western France. Around 10 years later, I invaded Northern France. A few days later and my character died. In order to prevent any crisis or civil war, I put it into observe mode for a year. When I came back, the AI had decided to declare a jihad for Bourbon, probably the least intelligent idea for artificial intelligence. I easily raised an army to defeat them though. And that was the end of my playing for that day.

[Jonas]

Completed Splinter Cell Blacklist yesterday. It was pretty terrible, and go even more so by the end.

What makes you say that?

[shadowblade34]

Well, speaking purely about the single player, it felt a lot like Conviction, with an little bit of steath thrown in. It plays more like an action game than a stealth game. The detection system makes the game far to easy where instead of enemies "noticing something", they have only either seen you or not. The gameplay is pretty much the only thing most people disagree on, so I'll just say that the game doesn't feel as smart, if you know what I mean, as the older ones, even Double Agent. Visibility and sound are important in the older games, but not anymore it seems.

The story and characters are pretty bad, the ending "boss battle" was poor, and so are the first person scenes. As well as that, the levels don't feel that good - their design is rather lackluster, nothing stands out from any of the locations. The routes in them are mostly taking well placed pipes or vents around the enemies, so it doesn't feel as tense as sneaking up and stalking an NPC - partly because of animation, partly because of what I said before about the game not feeling "smart".

It sure is better than Conviction though, but not that much.

[Morpheus]

I don't really see how you can make an MMO from Deus Ex. If you're an augmented civilian perhaps, but what would you do as a civilian in the Deus Ex world? Wait for an augmented agent to uncover the secret plot to control the population and then sit back knowing you did nothing or will you be one of the thousands of agents who works for UNATCO finding out your bosses are evil guys all along. I do like to idea of having to kill a load of bums to get enough XP to buy your first aug though.

What about FaceTown? I am not sure since it hasn't been released yet, but I think it may come the closest to a Deus Ex style MMO, especially if you read the features its supposed to have: http://www.moddb.com/mods/facetown

[Jonas]

SO! I just finished The Brigmore Witches, the second piece of DLC for Dishonored, which concludes Daud's story arc. It was brilliant.

The level design quality in these bits of DLC was consistently some of the best design in the game, with one particular mission in The Knife of Dunwall being probably the best level in the whole game. The way they used your Chaos score in relation to Daud's character development made much more sense than the silly and superficial way it affected Corvo's endings, and it made me genuinely care about how I played the game. It helped a lot that characters seemed to comment on it more than in the original game as well.

And of course, the way I ended up choosing to play both pieces of DLC gave me a perfect story arc for Daud, with a little bit of tragedy along the way, which also conveniently fit well with a certain choice I actually made as Corvo in the original. So that was swell.

I also gotta give a special mention to the brilliant aesthetic subversion whereby the main antagonists in The Brigmore Witches (guess who, no points if you get it right) actually make their environments prettier wherever they appear. You're used to the enemies in fantasy games turning the lovely and pleasant world to shit around them so you have something to fight against, but here it's turned on its head as the witches actually turn the kinda crappy and plague-ridden city lovely and green wherever they go. Almost makes you not want to kill them.

In generally, if Dishonored was... let's call it an 8 out of 10, Daud's DLC-based story arc is hovering around the upper reaches of 9. Better character development, substantially better choice and consequence (with some of the people you help in The Knife coming back to return the favour in The Witches), better level design, better balanced and more all-around useful powers, and the best-looking level in the whole game so far.

Now I really hope to see a sequel. And I wouldn't even mind a few more pieces of proper story DLC in the mean time, either.

[kdawg88]

SO! I just finished The Brigmore Witches, the second piece of DLC for Dishonored, which concludes Daud's story arc. It was brilliant.

The level design quality in these bits of DLC was consistently some of the best design in the game, with one particular mission in The Knife of Dunwall being probably the best level in the whole game. The way they used your Chaos score in relation to Daud's character development made much more sense than the silly and superficial way it affected Corvo's endings, and it made me genuinely care about how I played the game. It helped a lot that characters seemed to comment on it more than in the original game as well.

And of course, the way I ended up choosing to play both pieces of DLC gave me a perfect story arc for Daud, with a little bit of tragedy along the way, which also conveniently fit well with a certain choice I actually made as Corvo in the original. So that was swell.

I also gotta give a special mention to the brilliant aesthetic subversion whereby the main antagonists in The Brigmore Witches (guess who, no points if you get it right) actually make their environments prettier wherever they appear. You're used to the enemies in fantasy games turning the lovely and pleasant world to shit around them so you have something to fight against, but here it's turned on its head as the witches actually turn the kinda crappy and plague-ridden city lovely and green wherever they go. Almost makes you not want to kill them.

In generally, if Dishonored was... let's call it an 8 out of 10, Daud's DLC-based story arc is hovering around the upper reaches of 9. Better character development, substantially better choice and consequence (with some of the people you help in The Knife coming back to return the favour in The Witches), better level design, better balanced and more all-around useful powers, and the best-looking level in the whole game so far.

Now I really hope to see a sequel. And I wouldn't even mind a few more pieces of proper story DLC in the mean time, either.

Having read this I may actually try this DLC. I'm naturally skeptical towards DLC...I'd rather they just release a second game, but you know, there's always pressure to give it a believable story and all of that crap.

[Jaedar]

Skyrim with Requiem.

Requiem is a mod for skyrim that aims to make it better. And it does. It removes all level scaling, meaning at any time you could walk into a shop and find that they're selling ebony armor or some super enchanted thing. The same goes for dungeons. It also adds quite a bit of handplaced loot. It also increases the difficulty and impact of player specialization(most skills are pretty useless without invested perks). It's not all good though. The difficulty sort of doesn't work in a game like skyrim. Dieing in very few hits can certainly work in a game designed for that(like dark souls), but in skyrim where you are supposed to have a sizeable health buffer, it doesn't work nearly as well. Most of the lategame enemies also have rather ridiculous amounts of health, so while you will still die easily, they can take a truck to the face and shrug it off. Dragons are the worst offenders, as it seems they're intended to now take 15+ minutes to kill, which isn't very fun when they have maybe 2 attacks each. The only good way to take them out is to make a poison from a daedra heart, which are now super rare but make truly monstrous potions(restore 300 hp and magicka per second for 30 seconds? crazy). It also adds some other cool stuff like when you take a magic perk, you get to choose some spells to learn automatically.

Also: Wow the thieves guild questline is horribad. HEY YOU WANNA SELL YOUR SOUL TO A DEMON?
1. I'm not sure what this deal entails. -> "You will be given power in exchange for servitude, now and forever." ->GOTO option 2
2. Sure thing!
And people wonder why I hesitate to call skyrim a roleplaying game.
And its not just the story, to fully complete the thing you have to do dozens of short sidequests, each entailing a long trip to a city to do one small crime, then one long trip back to report success. And you can't even do them in bulk because you're only allowed to have one at a time. And not to mention that all the 'real' quests are mostly combat based anyway.

[bobby 55]

I picked up Dead Island for $5 on Steam (66% off over the weekend). It's not bad for a Zombie-apocalypse type I guess. It's not as annoying as Dead Rising ended up being for me. My melee skills are sadly lacking, though there has been improvement after a couple of hours play.

[Jonas]

Requiem sounds pretty cool.

I'm playing GTA V. It's... well it's GTA, so it's amazing. But also it's GTA, so it's fucking infuriating.

It has some of the best writing in games. It has some of the worst writing in games.

If nothing else, it does have better plane and helicopter flight models than many flight games.

[bobby 55]

I just finished my first 12 hour gaming session in many a year. An entertaining Dead Island co-op game with Jane_Denton, who played with humour and good grace, and as a player is fricking awesome.

[Jaedar]

Requiem sounds pretty cool.

It is. I think you'd rage pretty hard at the difficulity though. It took me at least a dozen deaths to get through the tutorial....(alternative start mod is recommended)

[ggrotz]

Tuning a new video card for Deus Ex (looks very promising the way it runs with all the graphics fully loaded on it, just playing with drivers right now) and getting ready to play GMDX (yeah been busy).